Standards: Running Out of Steam

From the richest to the poorest, from the learning disabled to the
gifted, students throughout the United States are taught from a common,
demanding body of knowledge. They outperform all others on
international assessments. They graduate from high school and make a
seamless transition into college or the workplace, where they
demonstrate world-class skills, creativity, and academic prowess.

Such an educational utopia is what some educators have long hoped
will result from reform efforts that make high academic standards their
starting point. If schools nationwide would only raise their
expectations for all students by setting rigorous standards, the
premise goes, then learning and achievement would surely blossom.

To that end, thousands of educators and policymakers have been
laboring since the late 1980's to craft voluntary standards that will
promote academic excellence and equity. At the national level, the
movement began with an effort in the mathematics community to redefine
radically how that subject is taught. But it quickly gained momentum
and swept across the disciplines. Along the way, it picked up federal
funding and support and--to some observers--became more of a federal
than a national effort.

The movement also picked up opponents. Some fear the development of
a national curriculum and excessive intrusion by the federal government
into matters of state and local control. Others question whether the
emerging standards really meet the needs of all students.

Today, just as most of the multimillion-dollar efforts are nearing
completion and final or draft documents are widely available, the
movement has begun to show signs of slowing. Even its most ardent
supporters question how useful the standards ultimately will be. They
say that while some districts and states appear determined to adopt
rigorous academic standards, others seem bent on maintaining a status
quo that will deprive many children of a first-class education. "Some
of the expectations were unrealistic to begin with," acknowledges
Christopher T. Cross, the president of the Council for Basic Education.
Setting standards for the core subjects is a much more complex
enterprise than many had imagined.

But Cross believes that the idea of standards remains "as vital and
powerful today as it has ever been. Standards are the bedrock of making
major improvements in our schools."

Building Blocks

The work of designing standards began with content standards.
Essentially, these describe what students should know and be able to do
in a given subject area by the time they complete the 4th, 8th, and
12th grades.

For several years now, a dozen groups have been developing these
standards. Half the groups have completed their work, four are in the
last draft stages, and two have yet to release drafts. Some of the
resulting standards, such as those in health, offer general
descriptions. The arts standards, on the other hand, are very specific
in laying out what is expected of students.

Content standards were to be the foundation on which excellence and
equity would be built. Once schools had content standards in place,
other pieces were to follow--new assessments, professional development,
new textbooks and other appropriate resources, and policies to
reinforce the expectation of academic rigor.

Such a design bears a striking resemblance to the way school systems
are structured in other industrialized nations, where students often
outperform U.S. students on international assessments.

Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of
Teachers, likes to point out that France, Germany, and Japan have an
interlocking system of curriculum, teacher training, textbooks,
assessments, and consequences. Students are tested on curriculum that
is based on national standards. And those who perform well are rewarded
with entree to institutions of higher education and better jobs.

"They have a connected system," Shanker says. "We have a system that
doesn't count."

But in these other nations, the national governments generally have
a hand in setting academic standards, a concept that is anathema to
many in the United States.

Not that the federal government has kept out of educational affairs.
It has required schools to educate minority students alongside white
children. It has forced districts to provide a free, appropriate
education for special-needs students and to give girls the same
academic and athletic opportunities as boys.

But the uneasy truce between states and districts and the federal
government in these areas has not meant that state and local officials
were willing to permit Washington to trespass onto such sensitive turf
as what is taught in the schools.

So it was a radical departure when President George Bush and the
nation's governors met in Charlottesville, Va., in September 1989 and
agreed to set national education goals.

"It was a major breakthrough," says Cross, who was an assistant
secretary of education under Bush. "It was inspired by a sense of
crisis about the perform~ance of schools and what was happening. We had
to put aside our traditional beliefs and positions and come together
around a new way to look at things, a new way to do things."

A Mathematical Model

None of the national goals eventually adopted by Congress
specifically mentions academic standards.

Another calls for students to be "first in the world in mathematics
and science achievement."

But without some way to define and measure terms like "competency"
and "world class," educators asked, how could the nation ever determine
if the goals had been met?

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had a ready-made
answer. Shortly before the historic goals-setting, the N.C.T.M.
published a 258-page book of curriculum and student-evaluation
standards. It redefined the study of math so that topics and concepts
would be introduced at an earlier age, and students would view math as
a relevant problem-solving discipline rather than as a set of obscure
formulas to be memorized.

Meanwhile, other education groups issued critical reports calling
for changes in curriculum. The National Science Teachers Association
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among
others, launched their own curriculum projects.

And the nation's most populous state, California, began a massive
restructuring of its curriculum frameworks that incorporated the latest
research about how children learn.

"We were converging on this notion from many different directions,"
says Shirley M. Malcom, the head of education for the a.a.a.s.

Diane Ravitch, then an assistant secretary of education, recalls
that officials of the National Academy of Sciences used the math
standards in urging Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander to
underwrite national standards-setting projects. Alexander bankrolled
the projects out of his office's discretionary budget.

Shortly thereafter, the National Council on Educational Standards
and Testing, a Congressionally chartered bipartisan panel, recommended
that content and performance standards be developed along with a system
of national assessments based on the standards. It also recommended
that states establish "school delivery standards" so that students have
the necessary resources available to provide them with the "opportunity
to learn."

Educational Apartheid

To be sure, critics quickly emerged. Some argued that national
standards diverted attention from more pressing issues. They also
feared that a government imprimatur might lead to the dangerous
precedent of establishing a body of official knowledge.

Some of those same arguments reverberate today. "Some kids [are]
going to schools which are barely habitable," says Theodore R. Sizer, a
professor of education at Brown University and the founder of the
Coalition of Essential Schools. "The maps on the wall [of classrooms]
still call it the Belgian Congo. Those are the things that just cry out
for attention."

Writing about the national history standards, historian Hanna
Holborn Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago,
questioned why national standards were needed at all.

"However respectable the motive, a nationally certified, federally funded, consensus-laden version of history can only be seen as a kind of mandated
interpretation of the past, an official regulation of its lessons--and
a sure invitation to political misuse," she wrote in a column in
The Washington Post in January.

Michael W. Apple's fears hinge not so much on standards as on
national testing, which, in the name of accountability, he is sure will
follow.

Apple, the John Bascom professor of education at the University of
Wisconsin, believes that the current political climate and budget
crises in the states will make it difficult to bring about the
improvements in assessments needed to give a true indication of whether
all students are mastering the content. Consequently, traditional
standardized tests will be used, low-income and minority children will
continue to fare poorly on them, and their schools will receive failing
grades. Taxpayers and policymakers will refuse to fund such
institutions, and they will be effectively abandoned.

"National standards and national testing are the first steps toward
educational apartheid under the rhetoric of accountability," Apple
contends.

Broad-Based Support

Despite these concerns, numerous polls show the public
overwhelmingly supports the idea of high standard

One of the most in-depth gauges of public sentiment was undertaken
in the fall of 1991. A series of focus groups, made up predominantly of
parents, was conducted in 10 cities for the New Standards project, a
consortium of states and school districts that is creating a national
system of standards and assessments.

"There was a near consensus that there should be a set of standards
established for the nation as a whole," says Vince Breglio, the
president of RSM, the Lanham, Md.-based consulting firm that convened
the groups.

High standards were more important to working- and middle-class
parents who worried that their children might not succeed because the
schools did not expect or demand as much of them, Breglio explains.

But the focus groups were wary about "Big Brother" setting the
standards and said it would be imperative for parents and teachers to
be involved.

They were also skeptical about applying the same standards to all
children--a central tenet of the movement.

The poor performance of U.S. students, as meas~ured by such tests as
the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also brought the
business community on board. Heightening employers' anxiety was the
realization that the workforce of the future had to be far better
skilled and knowledgeable than previous generations because of the
changing world economy.

A uniform system of standards and assessments would also help
employers judge prospective workers. A recent federal survey of
managers from more than 3,000 companies found that employers were
reluctant to base their hiring decisions on grades, teacher
recommendations, and school reputations because of a lack of confidence
in their reliability.

"We would ultimately like to see national standards and national
assessments," says Sandra Kessler Hamburg, the vice president and
director of education for the Committee for Economic Development. "You
have to have an assessment system to go with it. Just to have standards
is meaningless."

Standards Everywhere

The notion of academic standards is really not a new one. Whether
they know it or not, every school already has standards. Schools that
send large proportions of their students on to the most selective
universities year in and year out clearly maintain rigorous standards.
In schools where students ordinarily don't perform well, individual
teachers may have high expectations. Even in schools in which the
administrators, teachers, and students don't know about standards, they
exist in the form of tests and textbooks. But the likelihood that those
standards are rigorous is slim.

The differing standards, advocates of a national approach believe,
sharpen the inequities within and between schools.

Paul A. Gagnon says the Cambridge, Mass., public high school his
children attended offered only two world-history classes for about 30
students each. "The rest of the students in a 2,000-student high school
never had a course," the research professor at Boston University
says.

One honors student recounts how after his freshman year in an urban
school system in New Jersey, he moved to a nearby suburb and his grades
dropped. "The school system was so hard," he says, and teachers
expected more.

"When teachers see you fail or skipping, they're constantly on your
back. 'Come to me this period and I'll explain it to you.' If that
doesn't work, they call the seniors as tutors."

"It would be bad," he continues, "if people in one state or one city
succeed or fail because their school systems are different."

Although the United States, in theory, has 15,000 sets of curricula
for its 15,000 districts, many educators believe there exists a de
facto national curriculum established by the textbook and test
publishers. And it's not a good one.

"What do these guys think is going on out there now?" Bill Honig,
the former superintendent of public instruction who initiated
standards-based reform in California, asks of opponents of national
standards. Right now, Honig says, there are too many trivial,
superficial lessons derived in large part from watered-down
textbooks.

Chester E. Finn Jr., a fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington
and a former assistant secretary of education under President Ronald
Reagan, describes the K-12 curriculum enveloping our nation as
reflecting the lowest common denominator--the kind that turns O.J.
Simpson and the Super Bowl into national standards. "I thought we could
change that," he says. "President Bush thought we could change that.
The governors thought we could do that." Finn doesn't think so anymore,
in part because of what's in the documents that have been produced thus
far. And, in part, because he thinks the federal government got too
involved.

Federal Involvement

In 1991, science and history became the first standards projects to
receive funding from the Education Department. Then, in summer 1992,
the arts, civics, and geography projects were funded, later to be
joined by English/language arts and foreign languages. Last month, the
Education Department decided against funding the economics project,
which will have to go it alone.

Other federal agencies and philanthropic foundations also
contributed to the projects.

There was no competition for the grants. "It was never really the
desire of the federal agencies that there be competing proposals," says
one insider. Federal officials wanted all the key players working
together to build consensus documents rather than fighting each other
over federal funds.

Essentially, groups interested in developing standards in a given
discipline simply approached the Education Department for funding. In
some cases, such as English/language arts, professional teachers'
organizations headed up the projects. In others, such as geography, it
was a collective of interested parties. A nonprofit educational center
took the lead in history and civics.

Meanwhile, other groups started writing standards in physical
education, health, and social studies without the benefit of federal
monies.

Most project leaders quickly discarded the notion of developing
performance standards, which basically describe what students must do
and how well they must do it to meet the standards--or how good is good
enough. They decided there was neither the time nor the money. They had
only two or three years to meet their deadlines--a relatively short
time for the amount of work required and the number of constituencies
involved.

History, for example, received funding in December 1991 and had to
complete three documents by fall 1994. In addition to its 29-member
oversight council, it had to satisfy 33 constituency groups.

Each project was also supposed to develop standards for all
students, but bilingual and special educators, in particular, question
whether they satisfied that requirement.

Confusion Reigns

In the beginning, policymakers and educators had hoped to see
concise standards documents that had common definitions and symmetry.
"We begged them to use the same terminology and definitions of their
work lest there be total confusion," recalls Malcom, who was chairwoman
of a committee for the National Education Goals Panel.

Malcom says she feared the projects would not be taken seriously if
they did not keep a tight rein on their list of standards. "If you say
everything is equally important, you run a risk of saying nothing is of
importance," she says. "None has met the parsimony test."

Finn is less gracious in his critique. "The professional
associations, without exception, lacked discipline. They all
demonstrated gluttonous and imperialistic tendencies."

Taken together, the standards documents to date weigh 14 pounds and
stand six inches tall, excluding English/language arts and economics.
All told, their pages number 2,312. The shortest document is in health
and the longest is in science. Some, of course, are still in draft
form, and final versions could shrink or expand.

By contrast, the Japanese national curriculum fits into "three
slender volumes, one for elementary schools, one for lower secondary
schools, and one for upper secondary schools," according to Ravitch's
book National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's
Guide. And in France, Gagnon says, the standards for history,
geography, and civics combined run about 130 pages.

"In order to meet all the standards, we would have to have 14-hour
days," says Keith B. Geiger, the president of the National Education
Association.

Some of the projects' leaders had hoped to develop standards that
were compatible across subjects, making them easier for curriculum
specialists and teachers to use. Others balked, preferring to follow
their own muse.

The end result has been 12 documents, thus far, each with its own
format and definitions, including the four that were
self-financed--math, social studies, physical education, and health.
Two others, English/language arts and economics, have yet to be
released.

Some cover content standards only; some include performance
standards, and some list "opportunity to learn" standards that describe
the resources students need to meet the standards. Some even have
assessment recommendations. Some include teaching activities; others
don't.

And they clearly speak to different audiences. For example, the
history standards' teaching activities speak to classroom teachers.
Civics standards, on the other hand, have no activities and are
described as a technical document to be used for planning
frameworks.

Only in one area are they nearly uniform. Except for physical
education and health, they have all set their benchmarks at three
levels: grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12.

At least four organizations--the Alliance for Curriculum Reform, the
College Board's Forum on Standards and Learning, the Council for Basic
Education, and the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory--are
looking at ways to reconcile the standards documents.

Walking a Tightrope

The standards-setters acknowledge that their documents are
voluminous. But they maintain that they are realistic if schools
approach them as guides, picking and choosing what is appropriate for
their students. They also say the material is cumulative and practical
if schools start offering core courses earlier and more often.

Moreover, they believe that some topics can be taught across the
curriculum. History and geography, for instance, have standards related
to migration; geography and science both address the environment.

And, they note, they are in a no-win situation. They've been
criticized for their omissions and commissions alike.

Gagnon, who served in the U.S. Education Department when the
standards projects were first funded, compiled a list of criteria for
the groups to follow. But in the end, other officials chose a less
formal approach.

"What I emphasized was brevity," says Ravitch. She says she also
told the groups to avoid "pedagogical imperialism--to say there was
only one way to do things. Some of them at any rate did what they
wanted to do."

Both Ravitch, who worked for Bush, and Marshall S. Smith, the
current undersecretary of education, say department officials have
always walked a tightrope where the standards projects were concerned:
Take too strong a position and the federal government is accused of
dictating standards. Be too lenient and be accused of lackadaisical
oversight.

"If I had it all to do over again," says Ravitch, "I would hope to
have more time. I would have told all of these projects they had to be
deliverable in under 100 pages."

Had it been his call, Smith says he would have liked to have seen
the standards developed over a seven- to eight-year period, using the
same voluntary collaborative and reflective model the N.C.T.M.
followed.

Lynne V. Cheney, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says
the whole affair illustrates the pitfalls of government entanglement.
"As long as you have an instrument of the state involved, any effort to
control content is problematic," she says. "It's a perfect argument for
why the government shouldn't be involved in these."

A Public Lashing

The first public sign that the national standards were in trouble
came in March 1994, when the Education Department refused to continue
funding the English/language arts project. Department officials
complained that the project hadn't made sufficient progress. In
addition, its draft standards were vague and dwelt too much on
opportunity-to-learn standards.

Cheney says that an early version of the document defined literacy
as the creation of meaning. "Come on," she scoffs. "We have kids who
can't read bus schedules and we're going to say [that]? Literacy is
figuring out when it says the bus is going to come."

The International Reading Association and the National Council of
Teachers of English are continuing with the project. The groups hope to
produce a leaner, more focused document with the help of a broader
range of people.

But the delay has cost them precious time. Their first publishable
draft is not expected before late summer.

Because of the central place that English/language arts holds in
elementary schools in particular, districts and states have not waited
around for the N.C.T.E.-I.R.A. standards. "They will be well on their
way to completion by the time ours are rolled out," acknowledges Terry
Salinger, the director of research for the I.R.A. "What we hope to do
is work in a way that is congruent." Possible options include
professional development and assistance in turning standards into
curriculum.

But the controversy over English/language arts was nothing compared
to what was to come.

Last fall, a few weeks before the completed versions of the history
standards were scheduled for release, Cheney unleashed a blistering
attack on the U.S. history standards.

She accused the document of portraying the United States and its
white, male-dominated power structure as an oppressive society that
victimizes minorities and women. She also argued that it downplayed--or
outright ignored--such traditional historical figures as George
Washington and Robert E. Lee to placate advocates of multicultural
education. Suddenly, the relatively parochial issue of education
standards burst into the public consciousness via a flood of newspaper,
radio, and television coverage.

Cheney's views won such exceptionally wide exposure because, as
chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she had
lobbied for history standards, funded the project, and selected its
leaders and many of the people on its 29-member board.

Soon it became evident that the criticism was not about to
subside--even though there were far more supporters than
detractors.

The U.S. Senate even weighed in, denouncing the history standards by
a vote of 99 to 1.

Many of those who had worked hard for a national system of standards
began to see it falling apart.

Gordon Cawelti, for one, thinks it's a shame that a few people could
destroy all the hard work that has gone into the history standards, and
he cautions not to write off the entire movement because of it. "The
large majority of standards haven't been rejected. They simply haven't
had exposure yet," says Cawelti, the former director of the Association
for Supervision and Curriculum Development and a founder of the
Alliance for Curriculum Reform.

Since the assault on the history standards, the back-to-basics
movement has gained momentum. Fresh assaults have been made on math.
Educators are bracing for an attack when the science standards are
more widely circulated because of continuing turmoil over
"creationism" and evolution. And English/language arts is still
likely to raise hackles in some quarters.

Political Pains

Other obstacles have arisen that have little to do with the merits
of the documents themselves. Some of the earliest backers of national
standards claim that Congressional meddling has taken a toll on the
broadly supported movement.

The harshest debates centered on the Goals 2000: Educate America
Act. It provides millions of dollars for states that develop
education-reform plans including the development of standards and a
related system of assessments. As part of Goals 2000, the
Democratic-controlled Congress tried to require states to develop
opportunity-to-learn standards for the sake of its poor, urban
constituency.

But the idea rankled some of the governors who supported the measure
because such standards implied that states would have to fork over huge
sums of money to the schools.

"If you go back and read the report of the NCEST committee, we had
it nailed," says Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado. "Where we started getting
off track was in the Congressional enactment of Goals 2000 when they
began to micromanage and to come up with the [opportunity-to-learn]
standards, and it frightened people."

In the end, the law required states to establish standards or
strategies for providing all students with an opportunity to learn. But
the implementation of those standards would remain voluntary on the
part of states, districts, and schools. Congress also created the
National Education Standards and Improvement Council. The panel, to be
appointed by the President, was expected to review national and state
standards and assessments that were voluntarily submitted for its
approval. The law also set up a confusing and cumbersome system of
grant-giving to the states.

No appointments have ever been made to nesic, and now it is likely
that none ever will be. The chairs of the education committees in both
the Senate and the House, Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum and Rep. Bill
Goodling, have introduced bills that would kill nesic, excise all
references to opportunity-to-learn standards or strategies, and
eliminate all federal funding for the development of national
standards.

The G.O.P.-led Congress may also dismantle the grant-giving
process.

Despite concerns that nesic represented too much federal intrusion
in education, some educators and policymakers believe that some sort of
national review process is necessary. Malcom of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science wants a body to address such
issues as, "Are [model standards] comparable with the best standards in
the world? Are they technically correct? You shouldn't have to do that
50 times over."

Ravitch recommends a return to the original proposal by Presidents
Bush and Clinton: a NESIC-type board made up of educators, public
officials, and lay members and appointed by the bipartisan National
Education Goals Panel.

No Public Airing

Some analysts also suggest that there has never been a true public
airing of what the standards involve, which has led to confusion and
frustration.

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, for example, all three
candidates endorsed national standards and national examinations. "An
unfortunate side effect of this unusual agreement was that there was
very little debate among the candidates about this issue," notes John
F. Jennings, the former general counsel for the House education
committee, in a book he is writing about standards. "In retrospect, it
would have been healthier for the country to have had a full debate
over the need for such a shift in education and of the merits and
demerits of such a change."

Ravitch believes the public and parents will accept standards-based
reform if educators can demonstrate high-quality results, as they can
at Mission High School in San Francisco, where inner-city students
devote days and weeks to algebra and geometry projects.

"You see these kids who in most instances would have their heads
down on their arms and be half asleep and looking at their textbook
with dread," she says. "They're very excited. They're actively engaged
in math."

Fifty Experiments

Even though many educators and policymakers believe a wholesale
adoption of national standards is doomed, they are equally certain that
many schools will adopt higher standards in some shape or form.

Interest is running high, and orders are pouring into the offices of
the various standards groups. For example, the Los Angeles Unified
School District recently bought $2,500 worth of civics-standards
documents.

Evidence strongly suggests that the reforms will be state- or
district-based. Almost all state education officials say they are at
least reviewing the national documents.

"I have always thought of this as 50 experiments, but 50 experiments
carried out around the notion of improving quality and improving
equity," says the Education Department's Smith.

In Romer's view, the controversy won't kill off the concept because
it is too logical.

"Standards are simply that process that says, school year by school
year, this is the content of what you should know and how good is good
enough in terms of good performance. And if you're in the 6th grade and
you want to be employed by mci, you'd better know if you're on a track
to being employable. And if a school can't tell you that, the school
has failed you."

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